On sunday I organised to meeta guy named Grant. We met on the train from Brisbane to Bundaberg.

He is short, stocky, walks like a footballer and wears thick glasses. He's ginger and balding.

Someone I'd maybe wank about fucking someone else, not someone I'd ever actually sleep with

I'm not the sort of person to make friends on trains. I'd recognised Grant from the gay scene in Melbourne. The first time I saw Grant he was with Jacob. He stuck in my mind because I wondered if Jacob hung out with him to get free drugs. Im not sure why I thought that.

I saw hi to him on the train and later we got talking. He was sports-mad and once studied Law at Griffith University. Like me he was escaping the excesses of nightclub life in Melbourne to live at his parents house just outside of bundaberg. He was down-to-earth, masculine, even a slightly dorky. He talked a lot. I liked him.

We exchanged numbers and agreed to meet again.

When we finally met I decided to spend the day shopping before hand. I went to the suprisingly up-to-date shopping mall 'Hinkler Place' where I wondered around bookshops before getting a copy of the Monthly and sitting down in the food court.

I was in my shorts and wife-beater singlet..I was going to the gym that afternoon as well...of course it didn't matter that I looked like a dork, correct? Incorrect.

Two cute gay teen boys walked into the music store next to me.

One was really hot. Dark, small, muscles. Pretty.

Christ look at me. I can never escape gorgeous boys and panic attacks.

I walked over to the store and pretended to be looking at CDs while perving at them. They didnt notice me. That was actually a good thing. cause I realised i'd been 'looking' at the country music section.

My stomach filled with sick, I sat back down and watched them from a distance. I got semi-hard. My dick was reminding me why I was always willing to skip work if a teenage boy was lying next to me in bed.

I felt embarrased as well. I was kind of hoping they wouldnt see me. It reminded of me of wandering around shopping centres when I was that age. Alone, looking freaky with strange haircuts and bright yellow raver gear. Breaking out in a new cystic pimple with every fit of anxiety. If I saw another gay guy or even a good looking metro guy I'd fucking lose it. I could feel myself go red everytime. I gave them a thought bubble "look at that ugly faggot" when they met eyes with me.

I'd run in the toilets. Stare in the mirror. Wandering what it was about me that was so unattractive. I didnt mind being gay, being ugly on the other hand that was hard to deal with.

It reminded me of the sting I got when I first met gay men. They were hip, inner-city types. They took cool drugs, hooked and hang out with vicious drag queens. They treated gayness as membership to an exclusive group. A tall queeny skinny boy with a bad attitude and a penchant for fucking celebrities slept with me and then told me not to fall in love with him. He left me a shaking, dribbling, self-harming mess and scared me away from being around gay men and the gay scene for three years. When I did go back I walked up the door of gay nightclubs maybe a dozen times before I finally made my in and when I did I was relieved to find out not all gay men where good looking or hip.

Later than night I met with Grant. He had his glasses off. He was badly fucking cross-eyed or had a lazy eye, is that same thing??? It was a little disturbing. I met his grandparents. We walked to his ex-boyfriends house. On the way we talked drug abuse. He'd already told me on the phone he had been in the 12 step program. He said he could not get past STEP 5, dealing with difficult emotions. He went into more depth this time. He told he used to smoke $300 worth of ICE a day during a bad patch this year and he said he financed it all by dealing the shit. He said he felt bad that he fucked up a lot of peoples heads. It turned out he was the wholesaler to many of the hip young queens who sell drugs on the gay scene. We discussed all the people we coincidentally both knew. It felt weird crossing the bridge over gum trees and the Bundaberg river talking about fucked-up gay boys from Melbourne. I wondered how much of what he told me was true, about the drug abuse and drug taking.

I admitted to using heroin and needles. He went into lecturer mode. His comments about it being my "emotional blankie" meant fuck-all to me, but it was sweet that he cared. I asked him about the scare on his arm, it looked like a burn in the shape of a massive eye.

"I got it from injecting drugs"

"Your joking"

"No I'm not. I was shooting up meth and I fucked up"

I wondered if he'd injected when his lazy eye was having a particuluarly slack day.

"I hit an arterey instead of a vein. I got an absys."

I was surprised he didnt loose his arm. It was ugly and on-display. It was a foul scab on the former school football captain and young Queenslander of the year nominee.

"What do you tell people when they ask you about it"

"Just that I had absys" he says.

I couldn't decide whether Grant was a massive fucking hedonist or someone who would do anything to fit in with pretentious city queens or a self-loather with a distaste for waking reality. But either way the conversation loosened us up, suddenly we had that unspoken closeness that in my life I only get so quickly with other drug users.

When got to the house we drank UDL's and listened to Ministry of Sound. His ex was ginger like Grant. I have never felt so un-ginger in my life. It was a good feeling.

His ex's Mum drank with us and asked Grant to get her pot later in the week. He was looked thrilled to be of some use to her. She told me I looked young for my age and that "I had great manners". I sat next to her and stared into her pale, life-weary face. She wore slim reading glasses and wore no make-up. She told me about her life with her croc-hunter Dad. They would go out in the black of night on a small boat and shoot huge crocs, selling their skins. She said she saw many Crocododiles snatch Kangaroos and Wallabies from the sit of the river.

"It takes hours for a Crocodile to kill them. Its terrible. There is something I could never cope with seeing these horrible creatures destroy a beautiful innocent life"

"Its nature, isnt it?" I argued.

"You should always try and intervene when you see cruel things. Some animals are just nasty critters. I shoot Butcher Birds if I see them. We once had a lovely pet bird and one snipped off its head. They murder for the sake of murdering. They are evil" she said.

I remembered the time I saw two Butcher Birds tormenting a small possum in a tree.

My friend said that we should throw rocks.

'Its nature, yeah. Let them sort it" I said.

My Mum came to collect me and I invited her in. She picked Grant for the Kentucky fried drug pig he is. Soon the conversation turned to the psychology of use.

Both of them made cocks of themselves. Mum turned into Nancy Reagan saying drug abuse was simply a matter of self-control. Grant said he tooks because society did not completely accept his sexuality. I could see his lazy eye pulling its way out of Mum's eye-line as the discussion became heated.

Mum was really talking in puns about her attitude to my drug abuse. I looked at her pretty eyes and pock-holed cheeks - "you want to think my drug abuse is all about a weakness in my character, that it couldn't possibly be anything to do with they way you brought me up".

She might be right, but the BRAIN in me tells me otherwise.

Go fuck yourself Nancy.

On the way home Mum told me the guy's Mum and said she lost her husband when she was pregnant with him. She also lost her three-month old baby in a car accident when fleeing her violent husband. "I killed that baby" she said.

I thought back to her withered face. Her black and white convictions about interfering with nature and the existence of evil. I thought about how much she seemed to love her gay son. She was not a drug addict and this revelation made me think of Grant as a a sad sorry case for suggesting his drug abuse was from a lack of self-esteem.

"They were all nice tho" Mum said.

"Yeah I like them a lot too".

"Grants ex-boyfriend says he's really attracted to you"

"Why do so many guys get infatuated with me?"

"Its not a bad thing, love it while it lasts"

I told her I wouldn't be happy until I was living in Sydney dating Anthony Callea.

She laughed

I went to bed merrily drunk.

The next morning I got up, tired, dopey and satisfied.

It was cold. The drop in temperature meant I finally got a decent nights sleep.

I looked out the windom. There was mist on the surrounding hills. The drizzle feel calmy and put a dreamy little haze on everything. I felt insulated from the searing sun, I felt insulated from the world out there. I felt safe.

I smelt the wet eucalypt and watched Christmas miovies on TV. I drank Miso Soup. I didn't speak a word to Nancy Reagan.

I was happy.